


Sticky Fingers: Douglas's Stealing and Birling Day

by PlaidAdder



Series: Cabin Pressure Meta [5]
Category: Cabin Pressure
Genre: Birling Day, Edinburgh, Gen, Meta, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-17
Updated: 2015-08-17
Packaged: 2018-04-15 05:56:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,059
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4595454
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PlaidAdder/pseuds/PlaidAdder
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Why does Douglas steal? How much does he steal from MJN Air? How much of it does Carolyn know about?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Sticky Fingers: Douglas's Stealing and Birling Day

I know this is probably one of those heresies for which fandoms excommunicate you, but I cannot lie: I do not look forward to Birling Day. It’s just not all that funny to me for some reason.

Given that, I will use this Cabin Pressure Marathon post to ruminate on a question “Edinburgh” brings up: Why does Douglas steal? And another question in which I am interested: How much does he steal from MJN Air, and how much of it does Carolyn know about?

Scratch Douglas Richardson and what you find below the surface is a very old comic type that the Romans used to call the  _servus callidus_ , or “clever slave.” (Arthur would be the  _servus stultus_ , or “stupid slave.”) In Roman comedy, basically what would happen is that the nobles would get themselves into a hot mess and the clever slave would sort it out for them. Little British schoolboys were force-fed Latin classics for generations and you can still see the results in British comedy. The Romans didn’t spend a lot of time asking themselves why the clever slave is so clever, or why he’s always so pleased to use his talents to make life easier for the idiot aristocrats who own him, any more than P. G. Wodehouse stayed up nights wondering what was in it for Jeeves. (Of course, modern-day fans can just answer that question by shipping it.) 

Jeeves doesn’t steal from Bertie, though. At least not so far as we know. It’s possible that he does and Bertie just doesn’t notice. He probably doesn’t even know what he owns. But I think probably not. Part of the appeal of the Jeeves & Wooster stories is the fantasy of Jeeves’s sincerity in his devotion to a guy who hasn’t really done anything in particular to deserve it. 

Douglas is not that loyal. Douglas’s stealing, I hypothesize, was not originally about needing the money. He made good money at Air England and despite the enormous pay cut he’s still got a nice house and a nice car. I figure he stole because he felt entitled to do it; after all, no matter what Air England paid him, it can’t possibly have been what Douglas believes he’s worth. It’s part of Douglas’s charm, and also part of his tragedy, that Douglas is always looking out for Douglas, and puts himself ahead of anyone else. We all sort of wish we could be that ruthless in our self-love; but we also see how much trouble it creates for him. What Douglas loves most about his “favorite” wife is how much she loves him; he’s not particularly interested in her per se, and he eventually pays for that when he loses her. One imagines it was much the same with his two previous wives.

He also, clearly, gets some kind of satisfaction out of gaming the system which can’t entirely be explained by the material benefits. In “Gdansk” he gets completely absorbed in hustling Martin, even when he’s only playing for cheese and strudel. In fact, he doesn’t bring money into it until Martin makes him good and angry. So he likes winning; and getting something for nothing, especially as a result of his own cleverness, makes him feel like he’s winning, even as the evidence–his age, his dim employment prospects, his current salary and status, his three divorces–suggests that in the long term, he’s not.

So how much does he steal from MJN Air?

The Birling Day episodes usually present the Tallisker theft the way Douglas describes it in “Edinburgh”–as a game, a kind of sporting contest between the show’s two toughest and wiliest characters. Carolyn, in “Edinburgh,” says, “It’s not a game, it is systematic theft.” Which it is; that whiskey is one of Carolyn’s operating expenses, and Douglas’s theft of it contributes, albeit in a fairly small way, to MJN’s unprofitability. The other systematic theft of Douglas’s that we know about from “Douz” is the fuel. This would appear not to be a loss for Carolyn, since this is fuel they wouldn’t be able to use anyway; still, Douglas is undeniably feathering his nest at MJN Air’s expense there. Carolyn also refers to Douglas’s unscheduled trip to his daughter’s birthday part in “Johannesburg” as stealing; and although he’s not actually stealing the plane he is using up fuel, time, and wear and tear on GERTI without compensating Carolyn for it.

So Carolyn is desperately trying to keep alive a business that is losing money. She has hired a pilot who she knows was fired for stealing. MJN Air has been running for years before Martin ever shows up, evidently with Douglas as captain. It is impossible to imagine that in all that time, she and Douglas never had a confrontation about his stealing. He’d feel even more entitled now that he’s working for peanuts for this crappy little airline, and Carolyn obviously pays very close attention to the cash flow. She’s probably caught him stealing something bigger than the Tallisker. She’s probably caught him doing that more than once.

So all in all I am inclined to see the Tallisker ‘game’ as Carolyn’s way of managing Douglas’s stealing. She has to control it somehow because MJN Air can’t afford it; but obviously Douglas Richardson is not going to give  _up_  stealing. So, in my Carolyn headcanon, she manages subtly to channel all of Douglas’s stealing energies into the contest over the Tallisker. She *acts* as if it’s a huge deal in order to make the contest sufficiently interesting to him; swindling it out of her has to be satisfying enough to Douglas to last him a whole year. But in fact, it doesn’t really cost her anything; she was going to buy it anyway, and she wasn’t going to get any of it back, since Mr. Birling would be drinking it all even if Douglas didn’t steal it. Mr. Birling apparently never notices the substitution, so there’s no risk that this will lose him as a client (at least not until Douglas starts putting vomit drops into the drinking glasses in “Paris”). It’s a low-risk way for Douglas to get his jollies without seriously hurting MJN Air financially.

But I wonder. Is Douglas stealing in ways that Carolyn–and we–don’t know about? *Could* he really steal from her without her noticing? 

 


End file.
